Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

The block was for IP's too, so you can't just change your DNS. You have to use some proxy service, or VPN, which makes it harder. And they also blocked one of EFF Finland sites as collateral damage.

Just as a side note, before all the usual "haha it's already circumvented" comments come in. They don't care about that, they just want to make it harder for casual people to pirate. That's what DRM does, too. It's why all those "DRM can always be cracked, somehow" comments are stupid too. The main purpose is to make it harder for casual people.

DRM doesn't stop casual people from pirating when they can go to thepiratebay (or wherever) and get the movie pre-cracked. The guys who get the original movie have to crack it, but once done, no one else has to care. Blocking the IP addresses are slightly more effective in that way.

IP addresses are a limited commodity that cost $, granted a lot less if ipv6 ever rolls out, but until then, banning an IP is pretty damn effective to prevent the host from doing much, the browser (user) can still use a proxy to circumvent though. Also, once you hit the swarm w the torrent file, I doubt all those IPs are banned:) Finland is just trying to be like us (USA) w our SOPA bs. But what they don't realize is it's the blind (RIAA) leading the blind (congressmen) over here and nobody behind sopa

I bought a DVD with DRM and it would play in my DVD player but not on my computer so I returned it as defective.

Me too. The customer service lady made a big fuss about it, and was shocked that I would return a DVD in an opened box, and was even more shocked when the entertainment department told her to just give me my money back. She did so, but hesitantly, and it left me with a bitter aftertaste. I did not have a separate DVD player, so the disc really was completely useless for me.

I'll keep doing that until they figure out that it costs them more to add drm than not.

Other shops don't make me worry whether they'll let me return a defective product, they do, so they've lost me as a customer.

Sadly enough, Skyrim from tpb = no steam, Skyrim pre-order = mass steam. For those that don't know steam is a game launcher that likes to advertise whenever it feels like it, the equivalent of some of the android apps that use ads to make money, but a little bit more annoying. It's not a deal breaker, but better w/o. I'm sure there's a solution somewhere in all this mess;)

For those that don't know steam is a game launcher that likes to advertise whenever it feels like it, the equivalent of some of the android apps that use ads to make money, but a little bit more annoying.

If you don't want to see them, there's a box in "Settings->Interface->Notify me about additions or changes to my games, new releases, and upcoming releases" that you can uncheck to disable it. Personally, I keep it on because I like to see what's being discounted. If they had a way to notify me when one of the items in my wishlist was on sale, I might prefer that instead.

Ads for new releases and games that are on sale on the Steam service. After you exit a game, Steam usually pops up an advertisement dialog. Useful advertisements, if you like to buy games. If not for those ads I probably would never know that a game I was mildly interested in was on sale for $9.99 etc. I have also bought games I've never heard of, because Steam advertised them and the screenshots, trailers and writeup looked good.

Steam is probably the least evil piece of game controlling dictatorware out th

I know, I love Steam. I buy all of my games through their service. (Moreover, fuck any commercial game that isn't available through Steam) They provide valuable convenience to me.

I didn't always love Steam though. At first I highly resented it and get the great grandparent's point.

My first exposure to Steam was Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. Even though I bought it on brick and mortar optical media, it still required this Steam shit and that made me angry. Steam probably suffered some growing pains with suc

Watching my brother try to play blueray discs on a PC looked like a bit of a science project. Among the issues he had with finding a compatible player, audio would only be output through HDMI and his amp/receiver does not have an HDMI input, so he was running audio out from the TV back to the amp. If the TV did not have an audio out, a "cracked" video may have been the only solution, besides buying new components.

Unfortunately, I'm one of the idiots that trusted Sony with the Other OS on the PS3 when it first came out. I resisted updating the firmware because I use my PS3 as an alternate testing platform, which became more important to me than playing games. My cousin came over with a rented movie one night, I didn't realize he rented the bluRay version, and while I was upstairs making snacks my wife decided to start the movie. As soon as she put the disk in she was asked to update to the latest firmware

DRM has already failed... the vendor-lock-in situations with iTunes and PlaysForSure and lack of compatibility with MP3-only devices brought it down. Now, almost all music stores are Watermarked MP3... you can copy it on your own devices all you want, you just can't offer it to others without your watermark that can be traced back to you being spread.

But did you use a different credit card as well? A user account for Amazon can easily be filled with fake info, but credit card info is harder to make up, so I wouldn't be surprised if the watermarking was done by credit card or something.

It's not evil; a watermark is something very hard to detect, and that is often tailored to the specific user it's sent to, so that those who made it know how to find it and detect it, thus if a copy is made, the watermark will still be there and by detecting it they can match it to the user who broke out with it. A good watermark will resist a lot of different changes. Check the one put on movie soundtrack, that prevents them from being played back on playstation 3 or such if it's copied.. They've showed th

Not so sure about that. I recently got a pre-paid Visa, and part of the documentation included with it said that if I wanted to use it online, I was required to register the card. But perhaps not all pre-paid cash cards are like that. And perhaps if I tried it without registering, it would have still worked.

Sure, but those convoluted circumvention techniques tend to get wrapped into simple point and click tools for the masses. Say for example small service for Swedes to run that'll proxy just TPB and share the proxy as a "seed" on a torrent and a Firefox plugin to pick a proxy at random to use just for that site. Let them try banning all dynamic IP ranges in Sweden, that'll go over well... just as an example.

Blocking EFF is all but certainly collateral. The list was given by authorities, and they have a history with messing this stuff up in the past, such as blocking activist sites when making child porn block lists. In general, police around here prefers not to piss people off without reason, it's a cultural thing. Police is very respected here in Finland, in large part because it makes an effort no to abuse its rights.

We're finns are far more confused as to why this blocking order went through in the first pl

I don't think you said what you thought you said. You said "If just anybody can distribute their movie online and make a forture, why would they sell their movie to Paramount for a confession [wikipedia.org]

Use TOR for anonymous web browsing. If you use it for bit torrent it will probably fail if bit torrent is using UDP for file packet delivery which does not go through the TOR overlay which is for TCP packets. This may change eventually but it had not the last time I checked. Even if it does change the bandwidth requirements would make all the more important uses of TOR suffer as a result. Much better is to use an inexpensive VPN to a distant location. This has the added benefit of making all your internet a

I submit the example of My Mother. She is a typical not-very-tech-savvy consumer. She isn't dumb - she's a university graduate, and very good at what she does - but just has no skill with technology or desire to learn. Right now she can't even handle plugging an HDMI lead into the side of her laptop - the notion of selecting an input on the TV confuses her. DVDs, though, she understands: You buy a disc, you put it in the slot, a movie comes on. She even has to get me to rip her (legitimatly-purchased) DVDs

Ok now, since the context is Elisa it might be worth mentioning that elisa is actually a cable provider as well.

their current product with most advertisement is "Elisa Viihde" (Elisa entertainment) which is 40 euros a month roughly, either a dsl or cable-modem. av license, 500mt of webspace, 5 email addresses etc etc meaningless stuff.

and 5 TB of virtual tivo space(+clients for watching from android, iphone etc). that's a hosted digi-tv recording solution, what I think they do is that they just dump all cha

I'm frankly surprised that you can still type in thepiratebay.org in the U.S. and still get anything other than "Sorry, this site has been blocked by your ISP due to legal requirements." Hell, I'm surprised it's still even legal to show it in a search engine. Years ago, I expected the blocking to start much sooner. It's still coming though. Of course, when it is blocked, this will just set off an arms race where proxy sites and government/ISP's battle it out for a while, possibly leading as far as proxy blocking and maybe even deep packet inspection. But it's nice to have it without having to hack around a block, at least for now.

And it's particularly sad to see a country like Finland, traditionally pretty strong on free speech and consumer rights, sink to this level. Of course, the Finnish reputation for has become somewhat tarnished in recent years, with the unfortunate prosecution of Jussi Halla-aho [wikipedia.org], and the government's increasing deference to the EU and U.S. on intellectual property issues.

I fully expect the "Internet" to be a footnote in history when the people got out of their little box for a few years and were quickly re-contained. Unless a technology comes along to allow worldwide communication without a governable infrastructure, we're screwed.

If everyone had a wifi router forwarding packets, the only people who would need corporate infrastructure would be those way out in the sticks. The genie is out of the bottle, and he'll be hard to put back in. One presient sci-fi writer saw the internet coming and the "dangers" of uncensored communication and information retrieval. A Logic Named Joe, 1946. Its text is on the internet, but Google seems to only point to where you can buy this public domain work (copyright expired, not renewed).

Indeed. I would guess that the message would be 'This site has been blocked under US law section xxx.xx.xxx' followed by a suitably intimidating 'Your access has been logged.' Unless they just repurpose the child-porn filter to save money, in which case you wouldn't get any message at all, just a spoofed 404 or 403 page to make it look like the server is at fault.

I'm surprised too. I've been warning real life friends and internet associates for too long. They're probably past the point of believing me.I still download a movie a week. 3 times out of 4, I wish I hadn't. I wish I'd read a book or played a game instead. The wife and daughter go through phases with downloading music. I suspect they are dissapointed with their selections more often than not.

We will give up music and movies if these blocks gain more traction. That's the bottom line. We'd rather do somethin

I love watching American Football through an Australian feed. The commentators are more well informed than their American counterparts and the commercials aren't nearly as obnoxious. I do agree with you about sports needing to be streamed live. It's a money cow waiting to be milked.

I do agree with you about sports needing to be streamed live. It's a money cow waiting to be milked.

They said the same thing about putting sports on live TV initially. Until someone invented the VCR/DVR which meant you don't have to watch it 'live' and so can skip commercials thus killing the 'money cow'.

I sometimes enjoy watching a big boxing match but I'm not shelling out 50 bucks for a 5 minute knockout. I also know that it will be on youtube and other places very shortly after airing.

Streaming today is simply live TV before the VCR. It will eventually be recorded at the destination and able

And it's particularly sad to see a country like Finland, traditionally pretty strong on free speech and consumer rights, sink to this level. Of course, the Finnish reputation for has become somewhat tarnished in recent years, with the unfortunate prosecution of Jussi Halla-aho [wikipedia.org], and the government's increasing deference to the EU and U.S. on intellectual property issues.

Well, atleast the ISp in question is prepared to fight the decision as long as it takes, that's gotta be worth something IMHO. In general ISPs are quite consumer-friendly here and often willing to pursue freedom of speech.

I'm frankly surprised that you can still type in thepiratebay.org in the U.S. and still get anything other than "Sorry, this site has been blocked by your ISP due to legal requirements." Hell, I'm surprised it's still even legal to show it in a search engine.

You can thank the US Supreme court for that. They're the ones that explicitly ruled against this practice. At the time, it was a tracker that was placed on trial for linking to torrent files, but the tracker won the case, to the US Supreme court, linking is considered free speech. Although, this didn't prevent the US government from pressuring foreign States to do internet blocking in the mean time (through various treaties and executive orders).

Finland got a nationalistic right wing government after the last election, like in more countries in europe.

People are afraid due to the uncertain economy. The reflex is to trust the political right more than the left in situations like this: fear often leads to xenophoby and calls for "law and order". As a side effect, all these right wing parties mainly serve the interest of the rich and vested interests, which leads to measures like limiting free speech and accepting all kinds of collateral damage in the

...don't care about actually blocking the sites as it still promotes their material.

The RIAA would have embraced free downloads in order to sell hard copies (CDs etc) were it not for the fact that the internet also promotes their competetion, the independent artist. They have radio, independents don't.

If they can have websites promoting people into using things for 'free', get used to it, comfortable with it, know it's worth paying for

You can't boast a 'I'm not part of the system' statement' when you're just a cog in it.

You misunderstand me; I don't worship money like most do. To me it's simply a tool. As long as I have food, shelter, beer, transportation, I'm happy. I don't need a God damned Lexus or a McMansion. But people actually worship money as if it were a religion, and judge a person's worth by how much money they display having. I find the statement "he's worth fifteen million dollars" disgusting.

I think it's likely that we Americans have the very worst public education system in the developed world. From what I've read, much of what Europeans learn in high school, Americans aren't taught until college.

Or at least prove slightly amusing. Taking down a website wouldn't do much, but you know Anonymous's history of somehow getting their hands on confidential data... maybe something incriminating will leak.

One of the blocked addresses is http://piraattilahti.fi/ (piratebay.fi if you translate it directly). This address, however, does not direct to Pirate Bay. It directs to the same address as effi.org. This is the website of EFF's Finnish cousin, Electronic Frontier Finland.

If this hasn't changed recently, you can only ask how incompetent were the people who implemented the censorship here.

This will include those of us who dont torrent music/movies/games. Some of us torrent to correct social injustices, like having to buy a $100, 100 megabyte program to play blu-rays on the blu-ray drive I legally purchased.

It appears that the block isn't functional yet. I can normally access thepiratebay.org. It's rather hilarious, as I am greeted with a demotivational poster featuring the "sponsor" of the legal action by IFPI.

By the way, if anyone in IFPI is reading: FUCK YOU IFPI YOU USELESS PIECE OF SHIT! HOPE THE INEVITABLE NEW TIMES WIPE YOU UNDER THE GROUND WHERE YOU ALWAYS BELONGED!Thank you for reading. Also, if you do work for IFPI, please consider a more honourable profession, such as drug trafficking or prostitution.

in my previous post (parent of this) I mentioned that I had still access to TPB. Well that was from our academic network - not sure who the provider is.Now I am at home, and we use DNA (which, apparently, isn't quite the same as Elisa), and I still can access TPB without issues.

This is strange, because I was under the impression that almost all providers (DNA included) use Elisa's WAN network infrastructure.

It's effective. I have Elisa provided network at the office and when a friend working in their NOC said they turned it on, I could no longer access them. Also it's not just dns, the ip's are null routed. I have to say I'm surprised they also did it for corporate customers, but as the company said, the claim was too broad (and the ISP is trying to be compliant).

Actually, in the common sense or morally, file sharing is MORAL. We share everything, we share air, food, language, knowledge, laws, expeience, etc.... EVERYTHING. And what is funny is if you go to elementary schools you will see this: SHARING IS CARING, so are we teaching our kids something IMMORAL? Nevertheless, instead of calling your common sense, there is actually pretty well documented and tried argument of why sharing is good, and why the copyright was introduced into society in the first place. Tran

so the minority groups that are wanting to control the society for their own profit, want to remove activities of a certain group. and your solution for that is, removing that group ?

boy. i dont know what to say - lucky us, because people like you did not constitute the majority in enlightened segments of society in history so that we were able to progress............ or, stupid you, because you think that removing piratebay would make those minority groups stop trying to control you.